Saying that today's White House meeting with Congressional leaders was "very constructive," President Obama just announced that budget negotiations will continue through the weekend and that he'll be meeting with Congressional leaders again on Sunday.

And when they reconvene, Obama said, it will be "with the expectation that at that point, the parties will at least know where each others' bottom lines are."

Lawmakers, he added, know there will be "pain involved politically on all sides" in any agreement.

This follows word earlier today that the Democratic president and Republican leaders in Congress might have bridged most of the gap between their positions on how to shrink the federal deficit and, hopefully, start chipping away at the more than $14 trillion federal debt.